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Genres:
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Crime /
Drama /
Mystery /
Thriller
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Release:
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Director:
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Francis Ford Coppola
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Actors:
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John Cazale,
Michael Higgins,
Elizabeth MacRae,
Mark Wheeler,
Robert Shields,
Phoebe Alexander,
Gene Hackman,
Allen Garfield,
Frederic Forrest,
Cindy Williams,
Teri Garr,
Harrison Ford
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Duration:
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113 min.
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Rating:
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(8/10)37
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Plot Summary:
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Made between The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), and in in the main an homage to Michelangelo Antonioni's art-movie epitome Blow-Up (1966), The Conversation was a return to paltry-regulate know-how films through despite Francis Ford Coppola. Impression watch qualified Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is hired to hunt down a babyish join (Cindy Williams and Frederic Forrest), taping their conversation as they amble through San Francisco's crowded Mixing Square. Knowing satiated well how technology can invade surreptitiousness, Harry obsessively keeps to himself, separating work fr... om his personal life, square refusing to discuss what he does or where he lives with his girlfriend, Amy (Teri Garr). Harry's work starts to trouble him, how, as he comes to find credible that the chat he pieced together reveals a thread by the furtive corporate Governor who hired him to murder the yoke. After he allows himself to be seduced by way of a call bird, who then steals the tapes, Harry is all the more convinced that a killing will occur, and he can no longer separate his difficulty from his morality. Coppola, cinematographer Neb Butler, and Oscar-nominated grumble editor Walter Murch convey the narrative in the course Harry's aural and visual exposure, beginning with the slow opening zoom of Union Provincial accompanied by the alternately muddled and fine sound of the couple's conversation caught by Harry's microphones. The Godfather Part II and The Conversation earned Coppola a rare tandem of Oscar nominations for Best Model, as far as two nominations in the interest Best Screenplay (The Godfather Part II won both). Praised about critics, The Discourse was not a popular hit, but it has since come to be seen as song of the artistic drunk points of the decade, as well as of Coppola's career. Its air of paranoia and suspicion, combined with its tormenting loner antihero, made it prototypical of the darker American art movies of the early '70s, as its audiotape storyline also made it seem eerily appropriate in regard to the era of the Watergate discredit.~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
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Tags:
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Conversation, The
A classic of unostentatious cinema from Coppola. In one of his finest roles, Gene Hackman portrays a surveillance expert whose work begins to challenge his morality - and sanity
Between making the epic The Godfather and its sequel, Francis Ford Coppola made this thriller about a reclusive surveillance expert, Harry Caul (Hackman).
Opening with an understated aerial zoom down into a busy New York park, the lunchtime chatter fizzing and buzzing into audibility over Caul's equipment, Coppola signals his intent to make a small, expertly crafted film. Self-consciously stripped of the excesses that he would lavish upon Apocalypse Now, The Conversation is the director's minor masterpiece, distinguished by a career-best performance from Gene Ha...
Best film of the 70s?
Long before he started making films about Robin Williams as a boy-child, Francis Ford Coppola directed intelligent works like The Conversation. Ostensibly about professional eavesdropper Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) who is hired to tape a conversation between two apparent innocents, Coppola fashions an extraordinary work that fuses urban loneliness and a deep suspicion of corporate America. Clearly influenced by Blow Up, in which a bystander is similarly drawn into a murky, conspiratorial world, this 1974 classic initially plays as documentary before the thriller element assumes prominence. Yet this is a thriller in which no gun is fired and no flashy pyrotechnics used to generate suspense. Instead, the dispassionate gaze and beguiling sound design do the work for us. Suffice to say that...
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